Exploring Intradiscal PRP for Back Pain Relief

[Dr. Guilherme Santos]:
To your point, I think a lot of the lack of awareness has to do with what treatments are out there and available for patients from a specific disease. You know 20 years ago, we all focused on what we call posterior column syndrome, so facetogenic back pain, right? Why? Mostly because we could to a certain degree address and treat facetogenic back pain, but 20, 25 years ago, there was not a lot we could do for anterior column syndromes, meaning discogenic, vertebrogenic, or disco-vertebrogenic pain.

I believe that now with, I wouldn't want to say that the beginning of, but the rising of orthobiological treatments being applied in pain medicine, specifically in the spine, everyone suddenly becomes more aware of anterior column syndromes because now we have something that we can offer patients that offers a potential line of treatment. Obviously, it won't work for everyone, it's not a miracle drug, but it's derived from your own body, your own peripheral blood. If you do the procedure and it doesn't work, at least under normal circumstances, you won't face any major complications or side effects from the procedure itself except for the small but non-residual risk of infection and post-procedural flare-up of pain for a few days and all of that stuff.

Having said this, most, I'd say, up-to-date literature suggests that about 35 to 40, 45% of cases of axial non-radicular back pain, low back pain, is generated from discogenic sources. It comes from the inflammation and late-stage degeneration of the lumbar intervertebral discs. What I say to my patients when they come in with axial low back pain, no red flags on physical examination, and before we start ordering any sort of MRIs, CTs, whatever it may be, if you present with these symptoms and your physical exam is positive for this and this, you're probably, like most of my other patients, have an about 50% chance that your pain is coming from one of your discs, and your discs may be degenerating.